Data centers are generally centralized facilities that provide Internet and intranet services supporting businesses and organizations. A typical data center can house various types of electronic equipment, such as computers which may include servers of various types (e.g., domain name system (DNS) servers), network switches, routers, data storage devices, and so on. A given data center can have hundreds or thousands of interconnected server nodes communicating with each other and external devices via a switching architecture comprising switches, routers, etc. The server nodes can communicate with each other according to established messaging schemes. However, such messaging schemes do not consider the state of the receiver of the messages. In particular, when a receiving server node is unable to process incoming packets due to insufficient packet buffers, overflow conditions, and the like, backpressure may occur causing the receiver to drop packets.